The embodiments described herein generally relate to providing efficient hardware filters for manipulating image data.
Many digital cameras, especially the lower quality digital cameras associated with cell phones or other portable electronic devices, do not produce very clear images of the captured pictures. One of the reasons digital images are often of a low quality is because the cameras use very small lenses due to physical space constraints on the portable devices. Smaller lenses inherently allow less light into the lens than larger ones. Less light results in a larger noise to signal ratio which produces a low quality image. The lack of a flash for the camera also introduces noise into the image data. Other factors for poor image quality include the digital sampling rate of the camera, the use of inexpensive lenses to keep the cost of the device low, and the limited computing resources of the portable devices.
Filters are commonly used in the manipulation of image data. However, applying larger filters to speed up the manipulation of image data requires complex and resource intensive hardware. Hence, in the devices having limited resources, such application of large filters becomes impractical to avoid slow response time.
It is within this context that embodiments of the invention arise.